Beaked hazelnuts are a wild food native to North America. For generations, the Indigenous people of British Columbia have passed down stories of these hazelnuts as a vital food source their peoples actively planted and cultivated.
Chelsey Geralda Armstrong
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Chelsey Geralda Armstrong
Beaked hazelnuts are a wild food native to North America. For generations, the Indigenous people of British Columbia have passed down stories of these hazelnuts as a vital food source their peoples actively planted and cultivated.
Chelsey Geralda Armstrong
Beaked hazelnuts are a little sweeter and more buttery than commercial hazelnuts. Nestled in a fuzzy, green husks that extends outward like the beak of a bird, beaked hazelnuts carpet the forest valleys of British Columbia.
For generations, First Nations tribes in the region have passed down stories of these hazelnuts as a vital food source their ancestors planted and cultivated.
These stories motivated Chelsea Geralda Armstrong of Simon Fraser University to look more deeply at hazelnut genetics, in the hopes of determining just how widely the hazelnut was cultivated.
Her team visited the archaeological remains of villages throughout British Columbia and sampled over 200 hazelnuts nearby. They determined that beaked hazelnuts had been actively cultivated across a wide span of territory, up to 800 kilometers or 500 miles away. This genetic detective work verifies how First Nations people changed the forest in long-lasting ways.
Indigenous rights attorney Jack Woodward hopes research like this can make a difference in the Land Back movement, providing evidence that land once considered wilderness by European settler colonists was actually being carefully managed by tribes.
“Crab apples and hazelnuts and certain other species that have edible fruit and nuts: They weren’t just accidentally found in the edge of the forest. Those were deliberately planted,” he told NPR.
Woodward plans to refer to Armstrong’s research in future court cases, arguing for First Nation Aboriginal title over certain Canadian lands.
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This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson, Jordan-Marie Smith, and Kira Wakeam. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Christopher Intagliata. Tyler Jones checked the facts.
